Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research enquiry focuses on the process of artistic endeavour, alongside models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

First then, to set the scene […] There is a room, stripped back, bare. Maybe the
lights are dimmed. Illumination comes from a chain of naked light bulbs — of
different colours perhaps — strung up somewhat haphazardly … and from the gleam
of a spotlight, which picks out two figures from the surrounding dark. Two
figures – let’s say a man and a woman. They pause … then begin to speak. It would
be improper to steal the thunder of their very first line, so … imagine an
ellipsis … the dot-dot-dot of passing time. Two figures exchanging visions of
the future, swapping narratives of optimism and despair, utopian and dystopian
imaginings. A man and a woman, illuminated, mid-flow in the to-and-fro of
exchange: “… in the future, everyone will have brown eyes; or ... in the future
there’ll be no word for weekend; or ... in the future small will be beautiful; or... in the future no-one will care about algebra or trigonometry or sequence
patterns or anything mathematical because computers will do it all, no problem;
or ... people will grow an extra thumb for quicker texting; or, people will learn to
walk on water; or, everyone will speak all the languages of the world; or ... no-one
will remember the seventies … or buses … or takeaways or… dirty weekends”. The
two continue to imagine what the future might be like through an unfolding
litany of prediction, projection, prospection and prophecy: “in the future; or
… in the future; or … in the future … or … or … or ” and so on.